CHAPTER XIX

 

July 7^th 1912

 

Mrs Foxe was looking through her engagement book.  The succession of committee meetings, of district visitings, of afternoons at the cripples' playroom, darkened the pages.  And in between whiles there would be calls, and tea at the vicarage and luncheon-parties in London.  And yet (she knew it in advance) the total effect of the coming summer would be one of emptiness.  However tightly crammed with activity, time always seemed strangely empty when Brian was away.  In other years there had been a wedge of well-filled time each summer.  But this July, after only a week or two at home, Brian was going to Germany.  To learn the language.  It was essential.  She knew that he had to go; she earnestly wanted him to go.  All the same, when the moment actually came for his departure, it was painful.  She wished she could be frankly selfish and keep him at home.

      'This time tomorrow,' she said, when Brian came into the room, 'you'll be driving across London to Liverpool Street.'

      He nodded without speaking and, laying a hand on her shoulder, bent down and kissed her.

      Mrs Foxe looked up at him and smiled.  Then, forgetting for a moment that she had vowed not to say anything to him about her feelings, 'It'll be a sadly empty summer, I'm afraid,' she said; and immediately reproached herself for having brought that expression of distress to his face; reproached herself even while, with a part of her being, she rejoiced to find him so responsively loving, so sensitively concerned with her feelings.  'Unless you fill it with your letters,' she added by way of qualification.  'You will write, won't you?'

      'Of c-c-c … Naturally, I'll wr-write.'

      Mrs Foxe proposed a walk; or what about a little drive in the dogcart?  Embarrassed, Brian looked at his watch.

      'But I'm l-lunching with the Th-Thursley's,' he answered uncomfortably.  'There w-wouldn't be much t-t-t … much leisure' (how he hated these ridiculous circumlocutions!) 'for a drive.'

      'But how silly of me!' cried Mrs Foxe.  'I'd quite forgotten your lunch.'  It was true that she had forgotten; and this sudden, fresh realization that for long hours, on this last day, she would have to do without him was like a wound.  She made an effort to prevent any sign of the pain she felt from appearing on her face or sounding in her voice.  'But there'll be time at least for a stroll in the garden, won't there?'

      They walked out through the French window and down the long green alley between the herbaceous borders.  It was a sunless day, but warm, almost sultry.  Under the grey sky the flowers took on a brilliance that seemed somehow almost unnatural.  Still silent, they turned at the end of the alley and walked back again.

      'I'm glad it's Joan,' said Mrs Foxe at last; 'and I'm glad you care so much.  Though in a way it's a pity you met her when you did.  Because, I'm afraid, it'll be such a weary long time before you'll be able to get married.'

      Brian nodded without speaking.

      'It'll be a testing time,' she went on.  'Difficult; not altogether happy perhaps.  All the same' (and her voice vibrated movingly), 'I'm glad it happened, I'm glad,' she repeated.  'Because I believe in love.'  She believed in it, as the poor believe in a heaven of posthumous comfort and glory, because she had never known it.  She had respected her husband, admired him for his achievements, had liked him for what was likeable in him, and, maternally, had pitied him for his weaknesses.  But there had been no transfiguring passion, and his carnal approach had always remained for her an outrage, hardly supportable.  She had never loved him.  That was why her belief in love's reality was so strong.  Love had to exist in order that the unfavourable balance of her own personal experience might be at least vicariously redressed.  Besides, there were the attestations of the poets; it did exist and was wonderful, holy, a revelation.  'It's a kind of special grace,' she went on, 'sent by God to help us, to make us stronger and better, to deliver us from evil.  Saying no to the worst is easy when one has said yes to the best.'

      Easy, Brian was thinking in the ensuing silence, even when one hasn't said yes to the best.  The woman who had come and sat at their table in the Café-Concert, when Anthony and he were learning French at Grenoble, two years before – it hadn't been difficult to resist that temptation.

      Tu as l'air of being vicieux,' she had said to him in the first entr'acte; and to Anthony, 'Il doit être terrible avec les femmes, hein?'  Then she had suggested that they should come home with her.  'Tous les deux, j'ai une petite amie.  Nous nous amuserons bien gentiment.  On vous fera voir des choses drôles.  Toi qui es si vicieux – ça t-amusera.'

      No, that certainly hadn't been difficult to resist, even though he had never set eyes on Joan at the time.  The real temptations were not the worst, but the best.  At Grenoble, it had been the best in literature.  Et son ventre, et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne … Elle se coula à mon côté, m'appela des noms les plus tendres et des noms les plus effroyablement grossiers, qui glissaient sur ses lèvres en suaves murmures.  Puis elle se tût et commença à me donner ces baisers qu'elle savait … The creations of the best stylists had proved to be far more dangerously attractive, far less easily resistible than the sordid realities of the Café-Concert.  And now that he had said yes to the best possible reality, the appeal of the worst was even less effective, had ceased altogether to be anything remotely resembling a temptation.  Such temptation as there was came once more from the best.  It had been impossible to desire the low, vulgar, half-animal creature of the Café-Concert.  But Joan was beautiful, Joan was refined, Joan shared his interests – and precisely for those reasons was desirable.  Just because she was the best (and this for him was the paradox that it was so painful and bewildering to live through), he desired her in the wrong way, physically …

      'Do you remember those lines of Meredith's?' said Mrs Foxe, breaking the silence.  Meredith was one of her favourite authors.  'From the Woods,' she specified, affectionately abbreviating the title of the poem almost to a nickname.  And she quoted:

 

                   ' “Love, the great volcano, flings

                       Fires of lower earth to sky.”

 

Love's a kind of philosopher's stone,' she went on.  'Not only does it deliver us; it also transforms.  Dross into gold.  Earth into heaven.'

      Brian nodded affirmatively.  And yet, he was thinking, those voluptuous and faceless bodies created by the stylists had actually come to assume Joan's features.  In spite of love, or just because of it, the succubi now had a name, a personality.

      The stable clock struck twelve; and at the first stroke there was a noiseless explosion of doves, like snowflakes whirling up against the clotted darkness of the elms beyond.

      'The beauty of it!' said Mrs Foxe with a kind of muted intensity.

      But suppose, it suddenly occurred to Brian, suppose she were suddenly left with no money at all?  And if Joan were as poor as that wretched woman at Grenoble, as hopelessly without an alternative resource?

      Slowly the last bell note expired, and one by one the whirling doves dropped back on to their turreted cote above the clock.

      'Perhaps,' said Mrs Foxe, 'you ought to be starting if you're going to get their punctually.'

      Brian knew how reluctant his mother was to let him go; and this display of generosity produced in him a sense of guilt and, along with it (since he did not want to feel guilty), a certain resentment.  'B-but I d-don't need an hour,' he said almost angrily, 'to c-cycle three m-miles.'

      A moment later he was feeling ashamed of himself for the note of irritation in his voice, and for the rest of the time he was with her he showed himself more than ordinarily affectionate.

      At half-past twelve he took his bicycle and rode over to the Thursleys'.  The maid opened the nineteenth-century Gothic front door and he stepped into a faint smell of steamed pudding flavoured with cabbage.  As usual.  The vicarage always smelt of steamed pudding and cabbage.  It was a symptom, he had discovered, of poverty and, as such, gave him a feeling of moral discomfort, as though he had done something wrong and were suffering from an uneasy conscience.

      He was ushered into the drawing-room.  Behaving as if he were some very distinguished old lady, Mrs Thursley rose from her writing-table and advanced to meet him.  'Ah, dear Brian!' she cried.  Her professionally Christian smile was pearly with the flash of false teeth.  'So nice to see you!'  She took and held his hand.  'And your dear mother – how's she?  Sad because you're going to Germany, I'm sure.  We're all sad, if it comes to that.  You've got such a gift for making people miss you,' she continued in the same complimentary strain, while Brian blushed and fidgeted in an agony of discomfort.  Saying nice things to people's faces, particularly to the faces of the rich, the influential, the potentially useful, was a habit with Mrs Thursley.  A Christian habit she would have called it, if she had been pressed for an explanation.  Loving one's neighbour; seeing the good in everybody; creating an atmosphere of sympathy and trust.  But below the level of the avowal, almost below the level of consciousness, she knew that most people were greedy for flattery, however outrageous, and were prepared, in one way or another, to pay for it.

      'Ah, but here's Joan,' she cried, interrupting her praise of him, and added, in a tone that was charged with sprightly meaning, 'You won't want to go on talking with her tiresome old mother – will he, Joanie?'

      The two young people looked at one another in a speechless embarrassment.

      The door suddenly flew open and Mr Thursley hurried into the room.  'Look at this!' he cried in a voice that trembled with rage, and held out a glass ink-pot.  'How do you expect me to do my work with an eighth of an inch of sediment?  Dipping, dipping, dipping the whole morning.  Never able to write more than two words at a time …'

      'Here's Brian, Daddy,' said Joan in the hope, which she knew in advance was vain, that the stranger's presence might shame him into silence.

      His pointed nose still white with rage, Mr Thursley glared at Brian, shook hands and, turning away, at once went on with his angry complaint.  'It's always like that in this house.  How can one be expected to do serious work?'

      'Oh, God,' Joan inwardly prayed, 'make him stop, make him shut up.'

      'As if he couldn't fill the pot himself!' Brian was thinking.  'Why doesn't she tell him so?'

      But it was impossible for Mrs Thursley to say or even think anything of the kind.  He had his sermons, his articles in the Guardian, his studies in Neo-Platonism.  How could he be expected to fill his own ink-pot?  For her as well as for him it was obvious, it had become, after these five and twenty years of abjectly given and unreflectingly accepted slavery, completely axiomatic that he couldn't do such a thing.  Besides, if she were to suggest in any way that he wasn't perfectly right, his anger would become still more violent.  Goodness only knew what he mightn't do or say – in front of Brian!  It would be awful.  She began to make excuses for the empty ink-pot.  Abject excuses on her own behalf, on Joan's, on her servants'.  Her tone was at once deprecatory and soothing; she spoke as though she were dealing with a mixture between Jehovah and a very savage dog that might bite at any moment.

      The gong – the Thursleys had a gong that would have been audible from end to end of a ducal mansion – rumbled up to a thunderous fortissimo that reduced even the vicar to silence.  But as the sound ebbed, he began again.

      'It's not as though I asked for very much,' he said.

      'He'll be quieter when he's had something to eat,' Mrs Thursley thought, and led the way into the dining-room, followed by Joan.  Brian wanted the vicar to precede him; but even in his righteous anger Mr Thursley remembered his good manners.  Laying his hand on Brian's shoulder, he propelled him towards the door, keeping up all the time a long-range bombardment of his wife.

      'Only a little quiet, only the simplest material conditions for doing my work.  The barest minimum.  But I don't get it.  The house is as noisy as a railway station, and my ink-pot's neglected till I have nothing but a little black mud to write with.'

      Under the bombardment, Mrs Thursley walked as though shrunken and with bowed head.  But Joan, Brian noticed, had gone stiff; her body was rigid and ungraceful with excess of tension.

      In the dining-room they found the two boys, Joan's younger brothers, already standing behind the chairs.  At the sight of them, Mr Thursley reverted from his ink-pot to the noise in the house.  'Like a railway station,' he repeated, and the righteous indignation flared up in him with renewed intensity.  'George and Arthur have been rushing up and down the stairs and round the garden the whole morning.  Why can't you keep them in order?'

      They were all at their places now; Mrs Thursley at one end of the table, her husband at the other; the two boys on her left; Joan and Brian on her right.  They stood there, waiting for the vicar to say grace.

      'Like hooligans,' said Mr Thursley; the flames of wrath ran through him; he was filled with a tingling warmth, horribly delicious.  'Like savages.'

      Making an effort, he dropped his long cleft chin on his chest and was silent.  His nose was still deathly pale with anger; like marine animals in an aquarium, the nostrils contracted and expanded in a pulse of regular but fluttering movement.  In his right hand he still held the ink-pot.

      'Benedictus benedicat, per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum,' he said at last in his praying voice, which was deep, with the suspicion of a tremolo, and charged with transcendental significance.

      With the noise of pent-up movement suddenly released they all sat down.

      'Screaming and howling,' said Mr Thursley, reverting from the tone of piety to his original harshness.  'How am I expected to do my work?'  With an indignant bang, he put the ink-pot down on the table in front of him, then unfolded his napkin.

      At the other end of the table Mrs Thursley was cutting up the mock duck with an extraordinary rapidity.

      'Pass that to your father,' she said to the nearest boy.  It was essential to get him eating as soon as possible.

      A second or two later the parlour-maid was offering Mr Thursley the vegetable.  Her apron and cap were stiff with starch and she was as well drilled as a guardsman.  The vegetable dishes were hideous, but had been expensive; the spoons were of heavy Victorian silver.  With them, the vicar helped himself first to boiled potatoes, then to cabbage, mashed and moulded into damp green bricks.

      Still indulging himself in the luxury of anger, 'Women simply don't understand what serious work is,' Mr Thursley went on; then started eating.

      When she had helped the others to their mock duck, Mrs Thursley ventured a remark.  'Brian's just off to Germany,' she said.

      Mr Thursley looked up, chewing his food very rapidly with his front teeth, like a rabbit.  'What part of Germany?' he asked, darting a sharp inquisitorial look at Brian.  His nose had flushed again to its normal colour.

      'M-marburg.'

      'Where there's the university?'

      Brian nodded.

      Startingly, with a noise like coke being poured down a chute, Mr Thursley burst out laughing.  'Don't take to beer-drinking with the students,' he said.

      The storm was over.  In part out of the thankfulness of her heart, in part to make her husband feel that she had found his joke irresistible, Mrs Thursley also laughed.  'Oh, no,' she cried, 'don't take to that!'

      Brian smiled and shook his head.

      'Water or soda-water?' the parlour-maid asked confidentially, creaking with starch and whalebone as she bent over him.

      'W-water, please.'

      After lunch, when the vicar had returned to his study, Mrs Thursley suggested, in her bright, embarrassingly significant way, that the two young people should go for a walk.  The ogival front door slammed behind them.  Like a prisoner at last restored to liberty, Joan drew a deep breath.

      The sky was still overcast, and beneath the low ceiling of grey cloud the air was soft and as though limp with fatigue, as though weary with the burden of too much summer.  In the woods, into which they turned from the highroad, the stillness was oppressive, like the intentional silence of sentient beings, pregnant with unavowed thoughts and hidden feelings.  An invisible tree-creeper started to sing; but it was as if the clear bright sound were coming from some other time and place.  They walked on hand in hand; and between them was the silence of the wood and at the same time the deeper, denser, more secret silence of their own unexpressed emotions.  The silence of the complaints she was too loyal to utter and the pity that, unless she complained, it would, he felt, be insulting for him to put into words; her longing for the comfort of his arms and those desires he did not wish to feel.

      Their path led them between great coverts of rhododendrons, and suddenly they were in a narrow cleft, hemmed in by high walls of the impenetrable, black-green foliage.  It was a solitude within a solitude, the image of their own private silence visibly hollowed out of the greater stillness of the wood.

      'Almost f-frightening,' he whispered, as they stood there listening – listening (for there was nothing else for them to hear) to their own heartbeats and each other's breathing and all the words that hung unspoken between them.

      All at once, she could bear it no longer, 'When I think of what it'll be like at home …' The complaint had uttered itself, against her will.  'Oh, I wish you weren't going, Brian!'

      Brian looked at her and, at the sight of those trembling lips, those eyes bright with tears, he felt himself as it were disintegrated by tenderness and pity.  Stammering her name, he put his arm about her.  Joan stood for a little while quite still, her head bent, her forehead resting on his shoulder.  The touch of her hair was electric against his lips, he breathed its perfume.  All at once, as though waking from sleep, she stirred into motion and, drawing a little away from him, looked up into his face.  Her regard had a desperate, almost inhuman fixity.

      'Darling,' he whispered.

      Joan's only answer was to shake her head.

      But why?  What was she denying, what implication of his endearment was she saying no to?  'But J-joan …?'  There was a note of anxiety in his voice.

      Still she did not answer; only looked at him and once more slowly shook her head.  How many negations were expressed in that single movement!  The refusal to complain; the denial for herself of the possibility of happiness; the sad insistence that all her love and all his availed nothing against the pain of absence; the resolution not to exploit his pity, not to elicit, however much she longed for it, another, a more passionate avowal …

      Suddenly, he took her face between his hands and, stooping, kissed her on the mouth.

      But this was what she had resolved not to extort form him, this was the gesture that could avail nothing against her inevitable unhappiness!  For a second or two she stiffened her body in resistance, tried to shake her head again, tried to draw back.  Then, vanquished by a longing stronger than herself, she was limp in his arms; the shut, resisting lips parted and were soft under his kisses; her eyelids closed, and there was nothing left in the world but his mouth and the thin hard body pressed against her own.

      Fingers stirred the hair above the nape of her neck, slid round to the throat and dropped to her breast.  The strength went out of her, she felt herself sinking deeper and deeper into that mysterious other world, behind her eyelids, into the sightless universe of touch.

      Then, without warning, as though in precipitate obedience to some inaudible word of command, he broke away from her.  For an instant she thought she was going to fall; but the strength came back to her knees, just in time.  She swayed unsteadily, then recovered her balance, and with it the consciousness of the outrage he had inflicted upon her.  She had leaned upon him with her whole being, soul as well as body, and he had allowed her to fall, had withdrawn his lips and chest and left her suddenly cold and horribly exposed, defenceless and as if naked.  She opened hurt, reproachful eyes and saw him standing there pale and strangely furtive; he met her glance for a moment, then averted his face.

      Her resentful sense of outrage gave place to anxiety.  'What is it, Brian?'

      He looked at her for a moment, then turned away again.  'Perhaps we'd better go home,' he said in a low voice.

 

      It was a day late in September.  Under a pale blue sky the distances were mournful, were exquisitely tender with a faint mist.  The world seemed remote and unactual, like a memory or an ideal.

      The train came to a standstill.  Brian waved to the solitary porter, but he himself, nevertheless, got out with the heaviest of the suitcases.  By straining his muscles he found that he was able to relieve his conscience of some of the burden that the ability to buy a poor man's services tended, increasingly as he grew older, to impose upon it.

      The porter came running up and almost snatched the bag out of Brian's hand.  He too had his conscience.  'You leave that to me, sir,' he said, almost indignantly.

      'T-two more in the c-c-c … inside,' he emended, long after the porter had stepped into the unpronounceable compartment to collect the remaining pieces.  'Sh-shall I give a hand?' he offered.  The man was old – forty years older than himself, Brian calculated; white-haired and wrinkled, but called him 'sir,' but carried his bags and would be grateful for a shilling.  'Sh-shall I …?'

      The old porter did not even answer, but swung the suitcases down from the rack, taking evident pride in his well-directed strength.

      A touch on his shoulder made Brian turn sharply round.  The person who had touched him was Joan.

      'In the king's name!' she said; but the laughter behind her words was forced, and there was an expression in her eyes of anxiety – the accumulated anxiety of weeks of bewildered speculation.  All those queer, unhappy letters he had written from Germany – they had left her painfully uncertain what to think, how to feel, what to expect of him when he came back.  In his letters, it was true, he had reproached only himself – with a violence for whose intensity she was unable to account.  But to the extent that she was responsible for what had happened in the wood (and of course she was partly responsible; why not? what was so wrong with just a kiss?), she felt that the reproaches were also addressed to her.  And if he reproached her, could he still love her?  What did he really feel about her, about himself, about their relations to one another?  It was because she simply couldn't wait an unnecessary minute for the answer that she had come, surreptitiously, to meet him at the station.

      Brian stood there speechless; he had not expected to see her so soon, and was almost dismayed at thus finding himself, without preparation, in her presence.  Automatically, he held out his hand.  Joan took it and pressed it in her own, hard, hard, as if hoping to force the reality of her love upon him; but even while doing so, she swayed away from him in her apprehension, her embarrassed uncertainty of what he might have become, swayed away as she would have done from a stranger.

      The grace of that shy, uneasy movement touched him as poignantly as it had touched him at their first meeting.  It was a grace, in spite of the embarrassment that the movement expressed, of a young tree in the wind.  That was how he had thought of it then.  And now it had happened again; and the beauty of the gesture was again a revelation, but more poignant than it had been the first time, because of its implication that he was once again an alien; but an alien, against whose renewed strangeness the pressure on his hand protested, almost violently.

      Her face, as she looked up into his, seemed to waver; and suddenly that artificial brightness was quenched in profound apprehension.

      'Aren't you glad to see me, Brian?' she asked.

      Her words broke a spell; he was able to smile again, able to speak.  'G-glad?' he repeated; and, for answer, kissed her hand.  'But I didn't th-think you'd be here.  It almost g-gave me a fright.'

      His expression reassured her.  During those first seconds of silence, his still, petrified face had seemed the face of an enemy.  Now, by that smile, he was transfigured, was once more the old Brian she had loved; so sensitive, so kind and good; and so beautiful in his goodness, beautiful in spite of that long, queer face, that lanky body, those loose, untidily moving limbs.

      Noisily, the train started, gathered speed and was gone.  The old porter walked away to fetch a barrow.  They were alone at the end of the long platform.

      'I thought you didn't love me,' she said after a long silence.

      'But, J-joan!' he protested.  They smiled at one another; then, after a moment, he looked away.  Not love her? he was thinking.  But the trouble was that he loved her too much, loved her in a bad way, even though she was the best.

      'I thought you were angry with me.'

      'But why sh-should I be?'  His face was still averted.

      'You know why.'

      'I wasn't a-angry with you.'

      'But it was my fault.'

      Brian shook his head.  'It w-wasn't.'

      'It was,' she insisted.

      At the thought of what his sensations had been as he held her there, in the dark cleft between the rhododendron coverts, he shook his head a second time, more emphatically.

      The old porter was there again with his barrow and his comments on the weather, his scraps of news and gossip.  They followed him, playing for his benefit their parts as supernumerary characters in the local drama.

      When they were almost at the gate, Joan laid a hand on Brian's arm.  'It's all right, isn't it?'  Their eyes met.  'I'm allowed to be happy?'

      He smiled without speaking and nodded.

      In the dogcart on the way to the house he kept remembering the sudden brightening of her face in response to that voiceless gesture of his.  And all he could do to repay her for so much love was to … He thought of the rhododendron coverts again and was overcome with shame.

      When she learned from Brian that Joan had been at the station, Mrs Foxe felt a sharp pang of resentment.  By what right?  Before his own mother … And besides, what bad faith!  For Joan had accepted her invitation to come to lunch the day after Brian's return.  Which meant that she had tacitly admitted Mrs Foxe's exclusive right to him on the day itself.  But here she was, stealing surreptitiously to the station to catch him as he stepped out of the train.  It was almost dishonest.

      Mrs Foxe's passion for indignant jealousy lasted only a few seconds; its very intensity accelerated her recognition of its wrongness, its unworthiness.  No sign of what she felt had appeared on her face, and it was with a smile of amused indulgence that she listened to Brian's vaguely stammered account of the meeting.  Then, with a strong effort of the will, she not only shut off the expression of her emotion, but even excluded the emotion itself from her consciousness.  All that, as it seemed, an impersonal regard for right conduct justified her in still feeling was a certain regretful disapproval of Joan's – how should she put it? - disingenuousness.  For the girl to have stolen that march upon her in those fine and generous aspirations of hers – why, she would be a splendid person.  Splendid, Mrs Foxed insisted to herself.

      'Well,' she said next day, when Joan came over to lunch, 'I hear you caught out migrant on the wing before he'd even had time to settle.'  The tone was playful, there was a charming smile on Mrs Foxe's face.  But Joan blushed guiltily.

      'You didn't mind, did you?' she asked.

      'Mind?' Mrs Foxe repeated.  'But, my dear, why should I?  I only thought we'd agreed on today.  But, of course, if you felt you absolutely couldn't wait …'

      'I'm sorry,' said Joan.  But something that was almost hatred mounted hot within her.

      Mrs Foxe laid her hand affectionately on the girl's shoulder.  'Let's stroll out into the garden,' she suggested, 'and see if Brian's anywhere about.'